Automatic centerline extraction of irregular tubular structures using probability volumes from multiphoton imaging

In this paper, we present a general framework for extracting 3D centerlines from volumetric datasets. Unlike the majority of previous approaches, we do not require a prior segmentation of the volume nor we do assume any particular tubular shape. Centerline extraction is performed using a morphology-guided level set model. Our approach consists of: i) learning the structural patterns of a tubular-like object, and ii) estimating the centerline of a tubular object as the path with minimal cost with respect to outward flux in gray level images. Such shortest path is found by solving the Eikonal equation. We compare the performance of our method with existing approaches in synthetic, CT, and multiphoton 3D images, obtaining substantial improvements, especially in the case of irregular tubular objects.